It’s been eleven months since I posted here – good intentions got swept up in the chaos and shadows that sometimes overtakes life. 2017 was a busy year.

One of reasons this blog faded was because I didn’t have space to do much in the way of crafting. The biggest event of 2017 changed that. I moved from a 500 square foot, one bedroom apartment to a two bedroom condo with almost twice as much room. Now I can find all my craft supplies without digging through stacks of bins and boxes. And my craft table isn’t piled high with some of those same bins and boxes.

Things are still a little crazy – I’m working swing shift for a few months as an instructor for our new hires at work, and I’m concentrating on my writing. But crafting is still important to me. So I’m going to start posting here again and by the beginning of 2018 I’m going to start actively working on it again.

I dropped off on the Spotlights I was posting too – and I’ll be bringing them back – along with book reviews and other wanderings in the shadows.

One of the things I’m not good at is following up on ideas. I get great ideas and intentions, and then forget to follow up on them. There are a couple of different ways I’m trying to map out tasks and ideas I need to follow up on.

I’ve created my own “planner.” It won’t really kick in until the new year, but it is helping me keep track of the events and tasks that are easily planned and scheduled. Once the new year starts I’ll probably add a bullet journal into it. I’ll try to include pictures once I figure out how I’m going use it.

I also have a “creative” journal – the idea was to divide each pair of pages up into seven sections and then decorate each of the sections with something that applied to that day. It could just be the date and a freehand background design or it could include other decorative items like tape or stickers. It could include the horrible drawings that I do – because I haven’t sat down and applied myself to actually learning to draw LOL. Great idea – execution not so great. Sometimes I remember to decorate a section and sometimes I don’t. It really depends on how many things I have on my mental list for the day.

I got smart and put all my writing ideas in one place. When I’m ready to take one from concept-and-notes to actual story, I transform the concept card/folder into its own file. And for the series that wasn’t supposed to be a series 😉 I’m creating a “canon” book or story “bible” so that I don’t lose details about characters, places, timelines, etc.

I’m still working on finding the combination of things that will let me map the shadows effectively.